A number of techniques are known in the art for configuring a virtual network. For example, virtual office, virtual local area network (LAN), and virtual private branch exchange (PBX) techniques have been developed. Such techniques can generally allow remote users working outside of their normal office or other “home” location to use features or capabilities of actual voice or data networks at the physical home location, as if the remote users were locally present and connected to the actual networks. This capability advantageously presents the appearance that any remote users are co-located with the local users at the physical home location, except for possible differences in communication performance due to bandwidth restrictions or other limitations in the wireless connections or other channels over which the remote users communicate with the networks at the home location.
A significant drawback of the existing techniques is that they generally fail to take maximum advantage of the improved connectivity provided by emerging wireless networks.
Emerging wireless networks include, by way of example, third-generation (3G) wireless cellular systems such as 3G Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) or the 3G Partnership Project (3GPP) Wideband CDMA (WCDMA) system, as well as wireless local area networks such as those based on the IEEE 802.11 standards. These and other recently-developed wireless networks generally provide a substantially higher data transmission capability than corresponding predecessor networks.
With regard to the above-noted drawback, conventional techniques may more specifically be characterized as requiring an actual network at a given physical home location, or more generally some particular dedicated arrangement of hardware, software or other physical network infrastructure elements, in order to provide the virtual office, virtual LAN, virtual PBX or other similar capabilities to remote users.
A need therefore exists in the art for improved techniques for configuring virtual networks, so as to remove or alleviate the undue restrictions that arise from the existing requirement that a given virtual network be associated with a particular dedicated arrangement of hardware, software or other physical network infrastructure elements.